We were thrilled to have been at the launch of the community consultations for the update of the South Australian Strategic Plan today.

It was inspiring to see so many community groups, businesses, individuals and government come together for the common goal of making the place we live the best it can be.

Launch of South Australia's Strategic Plan community consultations

South Australia has been really innovative in its approach - which has been recently acknowledged with an international award.

Carve has been working hard alongside the SA Plan team to develop a social media strategy that raises awareness of the plan, its relevance to everyday South Aussies and ultimately encourages them to ‘join the conversation’ wherever it suits them.

This also involved putting the tools in place to allow as many South Australian as possible to engage in the consultation process including a website that allows debate and discussion, a presence on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and more to come as the consultations progress over the next few months.

Here’s a nice graph showing LinkedIn’s  ( the world’s largest professional networking tool ) state today :

http://tinyurl.com/34sjvd6

We’ve written before about the growth of LinkedIn in Australia so we were interested to read about the organisations’ plans to increase the headcount in the Sydney office in The Australian newspaper today.

And as I was writing this post the below email from the fairly new MD, Clifford Rosenberg, just popped into my inbox as I imagine it will in every one of the 1 million Australian users this morning.

In addition to the appointment of Clifford Rosenberg as MD late last year, the company has also appointed a recruitment director, is looking for more staff and a media partner.

Mr Rosenberg said the decision to expand LinkedIn’s Australian operation came after a year of double-digit growth pushed its overall local audience beyond a million users.

“It’s a great starting point to set up this office and there’s a lot of exciting things we can do over here,” Mr Rosenberg said.

It is not clear how much the company plans to increase its local headcount. “I haven’t got a fixed number in mind. I’m not really at liberty to disclose our numbers by region. I don’t envisage a massive office but I do picture a group of highly motivated and enthusiastic individuals.

“We’re in a number of good discussions with telcos and media partners already, but it’s still very early days.”

You can read the full article from The Australian here.

While updating some LinkedIn training materials for a client session this week, I came across the following image from the LinkedIn blog that shows just how powerful a tool LinkedIn can be.

It shows that even though many people left the financial industry after the collapse, a large proportion stayed and you can see where they went. Interesting huh? Who would have thought.

You can read the full post here.

Econsultancy has put together a snapshot of some of the statistics floating around about social media usage and compared it to six months ago.

Regardless of all the bookmarking tools there are around, I’m always losing track of figures like this when I need them so I thought I’d whack them on here and I’ll always be able to find them - maybe you’ll find them useful too.

• Facebook claims that 50% of active users log into the site each day. This would mean at least 175m users every 24 hours… A considerable increase from the previous 120m.
• Twitter now has 75m user accounts, but only around 15m are active users on a regular basis. It’s still a fair increase from the estimated 6-10m global users from a few months ago.
• LinkedIn has over 50m members worldwide. This means an increase of around 1m members month-on-month since July/August last year.
• Facebook currently has in excess of 350 million active users on global basis. Six months ago, this was 250m… meaning around a 40% increase of users in less than half a year.
• Flickr now hosts more than 4bn images. A massive jump from the previous 3.6bn I wrote about
• More than 35m Facebook users update their status each day. This is 5m more than towards the end of July, 2009.
• Wikipedia currently has in excess of 14m articles, meaning that it’s 85,000 contributors have written nearly a million new posts in six months.
• Photo uploads to Facebook have increased by more than 100%. Currently, there are around 2.5bn uploads to the site each month – this was around a billion last time I covered this.
• There are more than 70 translations available on Facebook. Last time around, this was only 50.
• Back in 2009, the average user had 120 friends within Facebook. This is now around 130.
• Mobile is even bigger than before for Facebook, with more than 65m users accessing the site through mobile-based devices. In six months, this is over 100% increase. (Previously 30m). As before, it’s no secret that users who access Facebook through mobile devices are almost 50% more active than those who don’t.Okay, so now some new stuff that’s worth considering when looking at social media marketing that I’ve not included in previous posts:
• There are more than 3.5bn pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, etc.) shared each week on Facebook.
• There are now 11m LinkedIn users across Europe.
• Towards the end of last year, the average number of tweets per day was over 27.3 million.
• The average number of tweets per hour was around 1.3m.
• More than 700,000 local businesses have active Pages on Facebook.
• Purpose-built Facebook pages have created more than 5.3bn fans.
• 15% of bloggers spend 10 or more hours each week blogging, according to Technorati’s new State of the Blogosphere.
• At the current rate, Twitter will process almost 10bn tweets in a single year.
• About 70% of Facebook users are outside the USA.
• India is currently the fastest-growing country to use LinkedIn, with around 3m total users.
• More than 250 Facebook applications have over a million combined users each month.
• 70% of bloggers are organically talking about brands on their blog.
• 38% of bloggers post brand or product reviews.
• More than 80,000 websites have implemented Facebook Connect since December 2008 and more than 60m Facebook users engage with it across these external sites each month.

Something else interesting came out this week from Neilson (reported on Mumbrella) that showed Australians are the most prolific users of social media in the world. Apparently we here down under spend on average nearly 7 hours a month on social networking sites compared to the UK and the US at just over 6 hours.

There’s one more interesting figure I came across today and that is the growth of Facebook users in Oz - according to Facebook’s advertising information, there are nearly 8 million Facebook users in Australia (see full details on Laurel Papworth’s post here).

And if that isn’t enough stats for you for one day, check out this very extensive (and seemingly real-time) overview of Facebook usage worldwide at CheckFacebook.com.

For those of you who couldn’t make this, here’s the webcast from the excellent panel debate with Biz Stone,, Chief Executive of Twitter, Reid Hoffman Chief Executive of LinkedIn, and Stephen Fry…well you know who Stephen Fry is.
Focussing around Social Media: A Force for Good, the event was organised by NESTA as part of their superb Silicon Valley in the UK initiative.

Over the last few hours we’ve seen the newish Twitter lists feature disabled and vanish from our screens only to return again apparently completely back to normal. It caused ‘Twitter Lists’ quickly became a high trending topic and quite a lot of concern for many.

During the outage I spent some time meeting with Brenton Cannizzaro from an amazing digital agency in Adelaide, enpresiv, which came about entirely from a Twitter connection and my inclusion on one of his lists. Whilst I’ve now got his business card and therefore his personal details, prior to that, the only place I had stored his details were on Twitter - if they vanished, so too would Brenton from my database.

All is obviously good now with Twitter Lists and it was only a tiny window of downtime but, it got me thinking about what would happen if:

a) Twitter lists never came back

or

b) Lists returned but some of the people on it had been deleted or altered in some way

All that hard work categorising your friends on Twitter, creating a list that had just totally vanished and there’d be little you could do about it because you don’t have any control over Twitter.

It also reminded me I’d promised to post some highlights from Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith so this first one fits perfectly:

The authors talk about the importance of social networks and working at connecting with people on the web as a means of increasing opportunities for you / your business / organisation.

You Live or Die by Your Database

This section discusses your own personal database of connections, the representation of your personal network in a searchable form. Even if you’re a cog in a corporate machine, if you’re not in the business of building your own database of contacts, then you have to start. Now.

…one’s personal database was an asset as valuable as gold, if nurtured and maintained.

However, they stress it is important to maintain your own database away from online platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

Why?

Because you can never fully trust that your database online will be accessible, that your account will stay up, and that your data or account won’t become corrupt.

To us, storing a local copy ensures that you control the database at all times. If, as we say, you live or die by your database why would you trust a third party with its ultimate intergity.

So, the short lived AWOL Twitter Lists are back but what would happen if your LinkedIn contacts vanished? If you’d like to start your own personal database, here are some tips from the book that might help you get you started:

What should go into a personal database?

• First name
• Last name
• Title
• Company
• Email
• Phone number (preferably cell phone)
• URL
• State/Province where you reside
• Notes

Written by Sarah Thomas, Managing Director, Carve Consulting (Australia)

With now more than 1.1 million Australians using the corporate social networking site, LinkedIn, it is great to see  an Australian office open with Clifford Rosenberg as Managing Director.

Mumbrella has more details here.

LinkedIn Recommendations & Jeremiah Owyang is an interesting (and comic) article by Jason Alba looking at why you should consider requesting/giving recommendations via your LinkedIn profile.

I know there’s a lot of skepticism about LinkedIn in Australia, and it hasn’t perhaps yet proved itself here. Social network strategist Laurel Papworth recently suggested to a packed theatre full of marketing people at Marketing Now! to that perhaps Twitter was more effective/useful at this point.

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on how you view the value of these recommendations and if they replace/take place of the trusted old written reference.

Okay so these are US figures (from Forrester) but it is still pretty compelling: 3 out of 4 adults who use the internet fall into this ’spectator’ social media category - those who consume social media but don’t contribute. How many people do you know who don’t use the internet?

Even if your friends, colleagues, boss claim not to use Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn, chances are they fall into this ’spectator’ category (watch videos, read blogs, customer ratings etc) which Shel Holtz looks at in his post, “Less than 20% of online adults don’t use social tools”, so over to him.